jdate3_argfandomcom-20200213-history
THE GAME - WEEK ONE
TIMELINE https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TE27bEUn2WWBOLylAl2UEe5fQh2inJE6_VOsQXnkv5Y/edit The ARG begins On March 28th, John tweeted: "David has a new book coming out but he is too fat to tell you about it himself. Here's the site for it: http://jdate3.com/Site/MainSite" User BigEZ found the index of the site, including t-shirt images not on the merch page (spelling out "my shirt just says hat."), an email chain between John and Gavin J., and a password protected page. http://albertmarconi.com/ looks like just the main jdate3 site. Gavin Jeffcoat and his online presence Gavin J. is a paranormal investigator who has his own webpage, which is a little bit sparse right now, but has links to his social media accounts. According to the emails, he has set up a meeting with John on April 4th to interview him. all gavin's social media sites are real, including a YouTube channel with undeciphered videos and player submissions. He has an email for user submissions Submissions@ParanormalInvestigation.pro. :3c Gavin joined the Discord, and through some hint dropping, we were able to get information on shirts. Shirts On March 29th, Gavin Jeffcoat posted a tweet saying "I love that no matter where I go, Arizona Arnold palmers are 0.99. Someplace tries to charge me 1.05 for one I'm gonna flip a table. #true" He then also posted shortly thereafter "My favorite part of doing what I do is not accepting what we can easily see is all there is. I always keep looking beyond what's apparent" and "To clarify: I don't think we see the whole picture. You show me 5 things, what about the 6 just under the surface? I think I'm too hot LOL" Using these numerical hints, plus his prod from the Discord ("that's my name! Don't put it on a shirt and sell it.") put players focus on shirts, and 7 new shirts were found through urls with those numbers, 99 - 105. These shirts have players usernames on them, excepting shirt 100, which was found slightly later and has an image of a gas light, making it the only shirt with an image on it. Because these shirts have usernames, some players suggested that "hat." or the other shirts may be username for the password protected "received" page, contrary to the popular theory that "johncheese34" would be the username. BBQ Photo An mp3 file (http://jdate3.com/Site/assets/email/sent/6.mp3.) was procured from the website, and when changed to a image extension was found to have a timestamp: 1988:08:26 18:hat.hat.:40. When "hat." was replaced with 3 by user Timescape (chosen because Gavin's tweets included all numbers divisible by 3), an image of a barbecue gathering was revealed. The new timestamp on the BBQ image was 1988:08:26 18:33:40. User Feffers discovered this day corresponded with a holiday Ghost Festival in China, but the time of day had no meaning yet. MD5 Hash encoding User nesses found Gavin's website was holding a message in the footer, "ghost" encoded in MD5 hash, so from there the we chose MD5 hash as the tool to use with the images. ☀http://onlinemd5.com/ Using MD5 Hash, users encoded the full files of the .jpgs shirts found earlier, and shirt5 (hat.) was found to have the number 23F2AD41ED12B88D32F32C369C9B4909. On the password protected "received" page, Mika used this number with the username "hat" to reveal another page with 15 more password protected folders. In the source of the page was the message "Week One Complete! We hope you enjoyed it, things are going to get pretty weird from here. If you are one of the first few to see this message, try your luck finding a reward. No guarantees." User Beaver suggested adding "Reward" to the end of the url, which revealed a space to add an email and t-shirt size. THE GAME - WEEK TWOCategory:Weekly Updates